commonplace paragraph imprinted itself upon his brain as no line of
sage or poet had ever done, and then he folded it up and put it in his
pocket. In his exaltation he felt that even the mother he had never
loved was promoted to a certain respect as his father's wife, although
he was equally conscious of a new resentment against her for her
contemptuous allusions to HIS father, and her evident hopeless inability
to comprehend his position. His mother, he feared, was indeed low!--but
HE was his father's son! Nevertheless, he gave her a funeral at Atherly,
long remembered for its barbaric opulence and display. Thirty carriages,
procured from Sacramento at great expense, were freely offered to his
friends to join in the astounding pageant. A wonderful casket of
iron and silver, brought from San Francisco, held the remains of the
ex-washerwoman of Rough and Ready. But a more remarkable innovation was
the addition of a royal crown to the other ornamentation of the casket.
Peter Atherly's ideas of heraldry were very vague,--Sacramento at that
time offered him no opportunity of knowing what were the arms of the
Atherlys,--and the introduction of the royal crown seemed to satisfy
Peter's mind as to what a crest MIGHT be, while to the ordinary
democratic mind it simply suggested that the corpse was English!
Political criticism being thus happily averted, Mrs. Atherly's body
was laid in the little cemetery, not far away from certain rude wooden
crosses which marked the burial-place of wanderers whose very names were
unknown, and in due time a marble shaft was erected over it. But
when, the next day, the county paper contained, in addition to
the column-and-a-half description of the funeral, the more formal
announcement of the death of "Mrs. Sallie Atherly, wife of the late
Philip Atherly, second son of Sir Ashley Atherly, of England," criticism
and comment broke out. The old pioneers of Rough and Ready felt that
they had been imposed upon, and that in some vague way the unfortunate
woman had made them the victims of a huge practical joke during all